- GARRITAN PERSONAL ORCHESTRA 5 REVIEW UPDATE
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- GARRITAN PERSONAL ORCHESTRA 5 REVIEW PRO
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I’ve found myself using small string ensembles a lot over the past few weeks, and it’s something that few orchestral libraries have.
GARRITAN PERSONAL ORCHESTRA 5 REVIEW FULL
For them, as well as for producers, it also allows the creation of small ensembles or chamber orchestras for those cases in which a full symphony orchestra would be overkill. All this allows the creation of accurate mock-ups of orchestral arrangements for composers or music conservatory students for whom the difference between two trumpets and three trumpets is very important, and who need proper divisi. The strings also have small sections sampled. These are separate from the solo instrument samples – the solo samples are more expressive and colorful. One unusual aspect of the library is that while violins or French horns are sampled as a whole section and as solo instruments, there are also samples of individual section players which can be used to build a section of the size that’s needed. There are also various subtle background noises, to add some realistic organic noise and keep recordings from being too clean and perfect, but none of the really distracting ones like coughing, talking, tripping over music stands etc. The choirs can sing a few different vowels and are quite complete, with men, women, boys and children and even a soprano soloist.
If you don’t know what that is and need to look it up, don’t worry – I had to look it up too, and it’s apparently an instrument that hasn’t been used much since about 1820. There aren’t a lot of exotic or unusual instruments – no flugelhorn or cimbasso – though there’s a huge selection of percussion including some pretty rare stuff, a harpsichord, a celesta, and two versions of a glass harmonica. The instruments are essentially everything that would be found in a modern symphony orchestra – the usual strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion, harps, keyboard instruments and choirs. The samples are compressed, so the total raw sample size would be a much larger number if they were WAV files. Taking up approximately 12 GB of disk space, Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 is several times larger than GPO 4 was, but still compact by the standards of orchestral libraries these days. It is a 32/64-bit plugin and standalone application for Windows and Mac, and is a complete symphony orchestra.
GARRITAN PERSONAL ORCHESTRA 5 REVIEW UPDATE
I don’t think I’ve seen pipe organs bundled together with other orchestral libraries, so this is an interesting addition.Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 ($149.95 or $49.95 upgrade) is a major update of Garritan’s classic orchestral library. There is also the inclusion of some interesting pipe organ patches. But the Concert D Grand Piano is a great sounding piano patch. On the piano front, probably the biggest instruments in this library, they had the longest load times when changing patches. The Double Bass patches sounded very nice, especially the double bass Pizzicato patches. Here I felt like the samples needed just a bit of extra sustain to work within a composition. With the Strings section, I found that most of the patches worked quite well except for the sustained string patches.
The Basic Orchestra Percussion has some fantastic lower tom hits in there that could be really helpful for high impact cinematic material. The Orchestral Percussion section is great. But with brass, it's always tricky to sound convincing with samples. The Trumpets and Trombones samples can sound a bit raspy at times. With the brass section, I really liked the French Horns and Tubas samples. So it’s quite an efficient memory handling sample library.
GARRITAN PERSONAL ORCHESTRA 5 REVIEW PRO
I found the patches loaded quickly and could easily play back on my 13-inch MacBook Pro with 4 GB RAM.
GARRITAN PERSONAL ORCHESTRA 5 REVIEW PLUS
The big plus is that GPO doesn’t require a high spec machine with loads of RAM.